By Steve Woodward
It only was a matter of time. The Wall Street Journal’s “newsroom”, a quaint way of describing the editors and reporters now in its employ, has been compromised, or worse. Hijacked.
We knew this was coming. When media mogul Rupert Murdoch, an Australian, cared solely about making money he acquired The Wall Street Journal and the Fox News Channel because they were valuable assets delivering loyal audiences. His holding company’s name, News Corp., could not have been more vanilla sounding.
Back then, Murdoch, seemingly, had no intention of delving into the day to day content generated by the newspaper, long a beacon of objectivity, or the cable news channel, which had become credible and influential under the late Roger Ailes. Even The New York Times heralded Ailes as having built an empire at Fox News in his published obituary in 2017.
As Murdoch approaches 90, media insiders continue to debate which of his children will seize control of the marquee assets. Son James Murdoch in 2020 abruptly resigned from News Corp’s. board of directors, ending, for now, the presumption that this devout champion of the Left would overhaul the Journal even if it meant alienating longtime subscribers. (Business Insider reported James and his spouse donated $1 million to the 2020 Biden presidential campaign, which surprised no one).
But the nuclear event that wiped out center-right objective journalism at the Journal arrived when editor-in-chief Matt Murray, who had been with he paper for more than two decades, was replaced by Emma Tucker of The Sunday Times of London. She was not only the first woman named to the Journal’s top post. Tucker obviously was anointed to quell restless reporters who want the Journal to be more politically aligned with and socially “compassionate” like the New York Times and The Washington Post.
Tucker is delivering. (And, over at Fox, a similar tipping point brought the firing of Tucker Carlson). This background is useful in exposing and de-constructing a curious front-page story in the Journal’s August 26-27 weekend editions, “Group Identity Eclipses Policy As Driver of Partisan Divides”. Translation: Republicans are Trump cultists.
The central premise is this: “Decades of social science research shows that our need for collective belonging is forceful enough to reshape (emphasis added) how we view facts and affect our voting decisions.”
The reader of the this weakly premised blather must forge ahead to the ninth paragraph to arrive at the first reference to “research”. The article’s third paragraph actually forecasts what the Journal is up to — conservatives are nothing more than pathetic, Kool-Aid soaked sponges. This is no thoughtful assessment of America’s polarized politics in 2023. This, friends, is a Trump hit piece poorly disguised as “interpretative journalism”.
“The former president has been especially adept at building loyalty by asserting that his supporters are threatened by outside forces,” reporter Aaron Zitner writes.
The writer does not identify these forces, but two come to mind. One, of course, were the violent, swarming looters and vandals who destroyed American cities after George Floyd’s drug-addled body became a corpse in the arms of a Minneapolis police officer. (Another Black Lives Matter element waged similar terrorism on college campuses where clubs and faculty invited the “wrong” guest speakers). A second force is the Department of Justice and it’s quite blatant targeting of parental rights groups exposing gender grooming and curricula hijacking in public schools.
Other “forces” that inspired 74 million Americans to vote to re-elect Trump are just as obvious. 1. The Russian collusion narrative spun by multiagency federal government operatives. 2. A compliant corporate media that does not even bother distorting because lying is so much easier. 3. Social media oligarchs willfully censoring “misinformation” content and alternative media posts to run cover for Hunter Biden’s damning laptop, which was a storage vault of transcripts of Biden crime family exploits.
The forces to which the Journal assigns a murkiness are in fact hidden in plain sight. But reporter Zitner is not done yet.
“(Trump’s) false claims that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 election … have been adopted by many of his supporters,” the Journal scolds.”
Hold on to your MAGA hats. False claims? Why was it not only yesterday — July 4, to be precise — that a U.S. District Judge, Terry Doughty, ordered the federal government to stop telling Big Tech what social media content to censor. Absent deliberate censorship there is indisputable evidence that January 6, 2021, never happens because the lead-up to the election of November 3, 2020, would have played out very differently.
Wuhan virus hysteria deliberately fueled by the Left would have been countered, even marginalized, because social media’s smack down of common sense reactions to the pandemic would not have enabled widespread harvesting of absentee and mail-in ballots. And, independents and informed Democrats would have known all about the depth of Biden family corruption and its reliable bag man, crack and sex addict Hunter Biden.
Over on page A6, the Journal’s treatise rambles on. We finally read about a Pew Research Center Study finding 60% of Republicans view Democrats “very unfavorably”. (The real question is what in the hell is wrong with the other 40%?).
The inclination of Republicans and independent America First conservatives (there are more of the latter than ever) to remain loyal to Trump’s pro-Constitution, pro-growth, pro-energy independence, pro-border security policies (in other words, substance not saliva) is best explained away as old fashioned brainwashing, concludes the Journal. These very tangible reasons to vote a certain way directly refute the Journal’s disingenuous “group identity” headline.
“The human brain in many circumstances is more suited to tribalism and conflict than to civility and reasoned debate,” the Journal’s stenographer writes without evidence. Seems he might have plucked this line out of story about English soccer fans.
But let’s try giving this assertion the benefit of the doubt to see where it leads. Does tribalism explain open borders that facilitate the arrival of criminals and deadly fentanyl into our homeland? Is it tribalism that excuses unfettered black-on-back murders in urban streets but condemns a white insane person for shooting black or Jewish people? Do “tribalists” naturally demean and defund law enforcement as cities implode into chaos?
If so, how can it be that Biden loyalists who ignore stark reality at every turn are never dismissed as lunatics who vote in lockstep? They are never mentioned in the Journal’s hit piece. Neither are the adherents to “trust the science” and “climate change”. There was no curiosity, or research, about their groupthink, yet it destroyed our robust economy overnight.
Trump’s supporters are inspired by his determination and loyalty to America First. Biden’s rag tag army is blind to his dictatorial dementia and loyalty to China and Ukraine.